Chapter Seven #3
Recalling how her father had so many times said how much he longed for Wolvesly when he was gone from it, Elena asked Jacob, “Do ye long for Blackwood when ye are gone?”
As he so often did, Jacob gave thought to his response, the answer slow in coming.
“I miss Mam, of course, but more often than nae, certainly in the last few years, David and Malcolm and I campaign together, always with our father. But home? Blackwood?” He shrugged and stared into the small flames for a moment before saying, “I ken that ye can miss a place terribly and still ken that ye’re nae meant for it. ”
His words left her momentarily speechless.
“Ye dinna feel ye belong to Blackwood?” She leaned forward, firelight catching in her eyes. “How can that be? Is home nae where ye long to return?" The notion that someone might not yearn for the home in which they were raised seemed utterly foreign to her.
Jacob merely shrugged again, his face half-shadowed as he offered a noncommittal "Mayhap.
" He sucked the last morsel from a bone before flicking it into the flames, then fixed her with a steady gaze.
"What of yerself? Ye speak of Wolvesly as if it's yer very heart, yet ye're to marry Hamilton and make yer life in the Lowlands. "
A dry laugh escaped her lips. "I've asked myself that very same question.
I've concluded I must simply learn to be content, and—" she hesitated, wiping her fingers in the hem of her skirts, for lack of another way to clean them, "—I've told myself that bearing children would give me purpose enough to ease the ache of displacement.
" She grinned with a wee bit of humor. “Also, I’ve begged my mother to consider moving south.”
Jacob harrumphed a laugh, knowing as well as Elena how firmly her mother’s heart was joined to Wolvesly.
When Elena met his gaze, she found herself caught in his quiet scrutiny—as though he were piecing together a puzzle whose solution eluded him, and was made slightly uncomfortable, though she could not say why. She blinked and dropped her eyes to the fire between them.
Eventually, he turned his attention back to the fire as well, poking at it more than necessary.
“Strathfinnan will be in an uproar by now,” she guessed after a while.
“Aye,” Jacob said. “Like as nae.”
“My father could at this very moment, be hunting the very men who are following us,” Elena said quietly. “He willna rest, I vow. And my mother...” She hesitated, then shook her head faintly. “She’ll be worried sick.”
“They’ll ken what my absence means,” Jacob advised her.
She looked up at him. “What do ye mean?”
“They’ll understand that I gave chase, that I meant to reclaim ye,” he said, as if it required no further explanation. “Yer father would ken I wouldnae stop until ye were safely returned. He’d expect nae less—rightly so.”
There was no boast in it. No warmth, either. Just certainty, solid and immovable.
The fire popped softly as Elena turned his words over in her mind, wondering why they left her feeling disturbed. Jacob shifted where he sat, stretching one leg out, unaware of her trouble.
Elena kept her gaze on the flames, watching them lick at the stone, and felt something she hadn’t known she’d been carrying loosen and fall away. Not disappointment, exactly, but more a quiet recalibration, a settling into understanding.
Jacob hadn’t come after her. He’d simply ridden to her rescue because it would have been expected of him. She didn’t know why that distinction mattered, or why it deflated her just a bit.
Jacob glanced at her once, as if sensing the shift, though he couldn’t possibly guess the reason behind it. “Eat,” he said, not unkindly. “I need ye to stay strong.”
She did, since she was still hungry, truth be told.
“Do ye ever... think about Wolvesly?” She asked at length.
“Wolvesly?”
“The years ye fostered there, and those years while ye served with my father.”
Jacob scooted backward a few feet, far enough that he could lean against the cave’s wall. “Aye,” he said at last. “I do. I spent several of my formidable years there.”
She nodded, encouraged, but didn’t press.
“Yer brother dinna take to Wolvesly as ye did,” she announced, having known that from the beginning of Malcolm’s time at Wolvesly.
He was a fine young man, as quiet and serious as her own brother, Michael, but she’d sensed he’d never considered Wolvesly as a second home, as she often imagined Jacob did.
“I ken Malcolm enjoyed his time there, but aye, he had nae appreciation for the beauty of Wolvesly,” Jacob concurred.
“But ye did.”
“I did,” Jacob went on. “It seemed to me to be filled with such large personalities. And I did appreciate the landscape.” He glanced toward the dark mouth of the cave, as if he could see beyond it. “And the shore.”
Elena smiled faintly. “The beach,” she mused, knowing she would likely bemoan the lack of a beach at Strathfinnan.
“Aye.” His mouth curved, just barely. “Blackwood has nae sea, naught but the loch. Just stone and heather and trees that crowd too close. At Wolvesly, there was space. Wind. Cliffs, Shoreline. I’d spend as much time as possible out there.”
“I remember you doing that,” she said softly. “Mother used to say if she couldnae find ye, she need only look toward the water.”
“Aye. She spent a fair amount of time down there herself, as did ye. She told me the sea calls to some and nae others. Yer father dinna mind when I escaped there, so long as the work was done,” Jacob said. “And Dougal said a man who listens to the sea comes back thinking straighter.”
“That sounds like him,” Elena said, and felt a warmth of sentiment settle briefly in her chest.
Jacob nodded. “He was guid to me, Dougal was. And, of course, yer father as well.”
Another pause fell, not awkward, but thoughtful. The fire cracked, a spark lifting and dying.
“Those were easier times,” Jacob said, not wistful, just factual. “Before everything became... meaner.”
Elena traced a finger along the edge of Jacob’s plaid. “War, ye mean?”
He nodded and then a grin barely curved his full lips. “Adulthood.”
She smiled in return. “Childhood is much kinder.””
“If only we could have understood that then.”
“If only,” Elena echoed, her voice soft as wool, her thoughts just as soft.
She found herself staring at Jacob's hands, rough and scarred but deft in everything they touched, while a thousand small memories crowded her thoughts. So much of her childhood was tangled up with her heartfelt affection for Jacob Jamison. So many actions and decisions were made with him in mind. She learned to ride better than most girls, thinking she would race with him along the beach at Wolvesly—sadly, they did that only once. She made Dougal teach her how to wield a sword, thinking she might be able to spend more time with Jacob, sparring with him as her brothers regularly did; by the time she’d been at least proficient enough to offer a challenge, Jacob had been gone.
She pretended to enjoy cabbage with onions, knowing it was one of Jacob’s favorite dishes.
And she thought that eventually, he would just know that she loved him.
And then do something about it.
She wondered, now, what she might have done differently if she’d known sooner that nothing waited for her.
Would she have spoken up, confessed something?
Begged something of him? What might she have done four years ago, when he’d last ridden away from Wolvesly, if she’d known that was the last time she would see him until now, when she was to be betrothed to another.
It struck her that Jacob had never once, not in all the years she’d known him, regarded her with anything other than the sturdy but offhanded affection of a brother.
Yet now, sitting together in this small world carved out by necessity and chance, she wondered if there might have been another path, if only she’d done something. ..more.
Her gaze drifted from the flames to him, studying the set of his jaw, the stubble that shadowed his chin, the way the firelight made his eyes burn with a strange, flickering gold.
What did he see in her? Elena wondered. Did he see the girl who had always trailed behind him, or the woman now sitting across from him, her life a tangle of obligations and secret longings?